Day By Day by Chris Muir, cartoon for: 2/15/2005
I found this cartoon quite interesting. There's an arrogance to the blogsphere and popular sites especially in considering themselves the only real media source or the new thing. Blogs continue to be exceptionally good at fact checking and getting lots of incremental opinion out there. X says something, Y comments on it and adds two cents and so on. But I certainly would not consider them new competition. There has been competition as long as there was more than one media outlet. Any given paper would absolutely LOVE to have shown an alternative publication was inaccurate. Forbes Digital uncovering Stephen Glass is a great example. If there was one thing that bloggers do well it is turn up the volume on stories or points which were previously lost in the noise. This can be an exceptionally good thing or an exceptionally bad thing. I think one of the major problems is that the vast majority of bloggers (myself included!) simply pass the story on with no additional information other than their opinion. I know how subjective the mind perceives things and, trust me, just because you read something in 14 blogs that all linked to the same story does not mean everyone believes it.